The Middle Floors: A Right to AI-Assisted Self-Representation in German Civil Procedure

Germany lets a citizen argue her own civil case in the local court, and she may send a constitutional complaint to Karlsruhe on her own. On the floors in between, from the Landgericht upward, every filing must come from an admitted lawyer (§ 78 ZPO). For a century this rule was a reasonable shortcut. Legal skill was scarce and lived inside one profession, so a lawyer's admission was a fair proxy for the quality of a filing. Generative AI loosens that link from both ends: laypeople can now produce structured drafts, and lawyers can now file invented case law. This essay argues that the law should regulate what a filing contains and who answers for it, not only which profession wrote it. It takes seriously the strongest objection, that writing has become cheap while a judge's attention has not, and draws a larger conclusion from it: AI should not only make litigants faster but help courts read what citizens can now write. The proposal is narrow and testable: a right to AI-assisted self-representation in appeals from the local courts, built on a structured record, a verification declaration, a court-run quality gate, an optional review lawyer and a human judge who always decides, introduced through a statutory experiment. Because a better arrangement does not implement itself, the essay also asks who would have to agree, and why they might. The aim is not to dismiss a profession but to re-examine a mandate whose efficiency can no longer be taken for granted. A right that costs too much to claim is a right in name. Keywords: Access to Justice; Artificial Intelligence; AI-Assisted Self-Representation; Mandatory Legal Representation; Anwaltszwang; German Civil Procedure; Occupational Licensing; Mechanism Design; Judicial Attention; Legal Technology; Institutional Design; Judicial Productivity. JEL Classification: K41 (Litigation Process); J44 (Professional Labor Markets; Occupational Licensing); D82 (Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design); D02 (Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact); O33 (Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes); D73 (Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption). Publication type: Research essay / Working paper. Version: 1.00 (29 October 2026).